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Monday, 3 February 2014

History of Ecocide

History of Ecocide

“If liberty means
anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to
hear,” George Orwell wrote as a preface
to his novel, Animal Farm.

This is particularly true of the idea to make ecocide a
crime which has been around since the 1950s. Ecocide was almost included as one
of the international Crimes Against Peace alongside Genocide but dropped at the
eleventh hour – probably due to the opposition of some governments. The only
reference which remained inside the Crimes Against Peace is the mentioning of
“widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment” as a War
Crime (Rome Statute, Art 8, 2 b, iv) – creating the absurd situation that
ecocide is nowadays a crime in war time but not during peace. We believe this
must change and the below history illustrates that ecocide has been discussed
by the academia as well as the relevant UN committees – all it needs is
political will and a citizens movement to make it happen.

The first person to openly discuss ecocide was Professor
Arthur Galston, the scientist whose research led to the invention of Agent
Orange, the toxic which was to devastate Vietnam during its war. Speaking in
Washington, D.C. in 1970 before the Conference on War and National Responsibility,
he called for a new international agreement to ban ecocide which he defined as:
“… devastation and destruction which aim at damaging or destroying the ecology
of geographic areas to the detriment of all life, whether human, animal or
plant.”

His voice found a kindred spirit in 1972, when Swedish Prime
Minister Olof Palme – addressing the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment in Stockholm (which established the UN Environment Programme, or
UNEP) – cited the ongoing war in Vietnam as an “outrage sometimes described as
ecocide”. Interestingly, Vietnam also introduced ecocide as domestic crime in
1990.

Only one year later, Richard Falk, Princeton University’s
professor emeritus of international law, established that intent was basically
irrelevant when it came to framing responsibility for environmental damage
because most cases stemmed from another objective, be it profit or military
advantage. This framework lent Falk’s 1973 Ecocide Convention draft policy even
more authority and made it more effective internationally than the Genocide
Convention would ever be.

By 1978, an official UN study proposed to add Ecocide to the
Genocide Convention. The 1985 Whitaker Report came to the same conclusion,
recommending that special attention should be given to ecocide, ethnocide, and
cultural genocide when revising the Genocide Convention.

Research undertaken in 1988 by Canadian-Australian lawyer
Mark Gray and published in 1996 established the legal basis for the proposed
crime of ecocide by delivering the proof that the established principles of
international environmental and human rights law support such a crime.

The 1993 draft of the Code of Crimes Against the Peace and
Security of Mankind (precursor to the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the Crimes
Against Peace) included a crime of ecocide. However, by the time the Rome
Statute was adopted, ecocide had disappeared from the draft. Only three
countries are on record as having opposed its inclusion; namely the
Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Reasons for
this are unknown but there is a suspicion that nuclear arms were in the minds
of those opposing the inclusion of the crime of ecocide.

So the four adopted Crimes Against Peace are: Crimes Against
Humanity, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes of Aggression. The only remaining
reference to ecocide is Article 8, 2, b, iv of the Rome Statute which refers to
the “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment” as war
crime – however, given the AND (in contrary to our proposed OR definition) it
has so far not been possible to prosecute anyone for this crime which is
extremely difficult to prove.

In 2010, lawyer Polly Higgins took up the challenge and
submitted her proposal to the UN Law Commission to include ecocide, the Missing
5th Crime Against Peace, into the Rome Statute.

In 2012, we, a group of EU citizens, took up the challenge
to mobilise one million Europeans around the issue and to propose an ecocide
law in Europe and beyond.

The law of ecocide is a law whose time has come. We can make
it happen today, All it needs is political will. But politicians need to be
pushed. And that’s why we need a citizens’ movement. Join us today by voting
here, share this with your networks and get in touch if you want to get involved.

Dracha Arendee says:

David Jakupca is
an American Philosopher, Ambassador, Artist, Activist and Author. He serves
both as an American Cultural Ambassador and Universal Peace Ambassador in
International capacities. He is extremely influential through his works,
especially as a philosophical advocate and practitioner of the environmental
arts methods developing the Sustainable Age revolution.

Jakupca with his
wife, Renate, are the co-creators of the ‘Theory of Iceality on Environmental
Arts’, aligning the vision with real-world social conditions and logistics.
This work established and popularized inductive formulas for scientific
inquiry, sometimes called the Iceality Method. His demand for a planned
procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the
rhetorical and theoretical framework for the science of aesthetics, much of
which surrounds conceptions of proper Environmental Art Methodology today.

Jakupca has been
recognized as the ‘Spiritual Father of the Environmental Arts Movement’ and in
that capacity, several disciples of his work went on to spread the word on
Iceality. His ideas were influential in the 1990′s among scholars like Jane
Alexander, Chairwoman of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), who in the
‘AMERICAN CANVAS’ Project frequently adheres to the Method of Iceality approach
in its idealistic visions and entrepreneurial inquiries. Major organizations,
in particular, the United Nations, featured his Theory on Iceality in many of
their World Conferences. The result of this major global public promotion at
the United Nations level is that the Theory of Iceality on Environmental Arts
is now considered as the cornerstone of the modern sustainable global
Environmental Art Movement, and this concept is now replicated by artists,
architects, urban planners and sustainable organizations throughout the World,
reflecting a still growing global audience. However, it must be noted that not
all of Jakupca’s contemporaries did accept the new theory at once.

David Jakupca is
also considered to be the philosophical influence behind the dawning of the
millenniums Sustainable Age. In his works, David Jakupca called for a
development of avant-garde trilateral symmetry of social systems to align his
vision with real-world social conditions and logistics that contend with the
problems facing earth’s future. He always proposed that these
environment/humanitarian/cultural systems should be done in conjunction with
charitable purposes as a matter of healing this planet. Recalling Einstein’s
admonition, paraphrased here, that a problem cannot be solved by the same
thinking that created the problem in the first place, Jakupca, being ever
mindful of the ecospheric integrity, advocated that the Environmental Arts
should be practical and have as a holistic purpose the improvement of all
living things.

This changed the
course of art in history, from a merely contemplative state, as it was found in
ancient times, to a practical, inventive modern state that will, it time,
continue to lead to the new Methods of Iceality that will help prevent Ecocide
and make possible a Sustainable Age, a Culture of Peace for all Living Things
in the following centuries.

Although much of
these Methods of Iceality proposals will not be established in his lifetime,
his legacy was already considered by TIME Magazine, in their 2000 Millennium
Edition, as one of their Heroes of the Planet.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...